Critical Condition: Rellik

➢ “It’s gothic, it’s gruesome, and it’s all wrapped up in a reverse-time package (Rellik = Killer), that means we get to see what happened next, before we get to see what happened … Initially, I found the story a little cold, a little too clinical, a little pleased with its own cleverness, but by the end of the episode, I had been reeled in completely, and inevitably I am now desperate to know how it all fits together.” — The Guardian.

➢ “Crime dramas tend to stand or fall on their resolution. Rellik will even more so, since its ending will also be its beginning. Viewers will spend so much brain-power following the plot, it had better deliver. On this evidence, though, something deeply intriguing will unravel over the next five weeks. Not so much a whodunit as a ‘aha, but did he really?’. It might have gone backwards but it retained forward momentum.” — The Telegraph.

➢ “I’m not usually a fan of reverse chronology, which often feels pretentious. This, however, is reverse chronology with knobs on: bullets un-entering bodies, rain going back up into the clouds. It’s as if they’ve nicked Hermione’s time-turner in Harry Potter. So far, though, I think, it works as a dramatic device and shows the writers’ ambition.” — The Times.

➢ “We know that nothing from the Williams brothers is ever hogwash, or has been so far. So I hope there’ll be some canny means by which the ‘find out where it started’ theme dovetails beautifully with the way the story has been chopped into bird-sized crumbs and hops about from one time frame to another like a pigeon on an electrified fence. That couldn’t be just a flashy stunt, could it?” — Daily Express.

➢ “Rellik is a crime story told backwards, and while it might be possible to pull off such a trick in a novel, on television, where motivation is so much less important than the chase, it would seem to me to be almost impossible. Of course, I’ll have to reserve judgement on this for now, but what I can say is that the show’s structure is absolutely exasperating; ultimately, the audience may not stick around long enough to find out if they’re capable of keeping people guessing right to the end.” — New Statesman.